About

The #DHJewish - Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities website offers a single access point to news, events and projects on the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities. Furthermore, we provide access to a DHJewish Zotero bibliography and online community on Zulip. A people section is currently under development.

The origins of this website go back to 2015 when Michelle Chesner, the Norman E. Alexander Librarian for Jewish Studies at Columbia University, began collecting information about projects that sat at the intersection of Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities (DH). Her list forms the basis of the directory of projects on this website. 

The website itself came about as a result of several workshops that were held at the Institute for the History of the German Jews (IGdJ) in Hamburg. In 2013, the IGdJ organised the workshop Jüdische Geschichte digital (digital Jewish history). A follow-up workshop, From Tablet to Tablet took place at the IGdJ in Hamburg in 2017. 

During this workshop, the wish was expressed to create an online directory of projects that combined Jewish Studies with digital humanities approaches. That wish turned into a concrete website project called #DHJewish, which was enabled by a series of Digital Humanities grants from the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe launched in the wake of the workshop. In 2018 work on the project began at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg, led by Gerben Zaagsma and using Michelle Margolis' original list of projects as its starting point.

In January 2021 we also organised the international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age. This online event brought together more than sixty scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies. An edited volume with selected papers from the conference will in the book series Studies in Digital History and Hermeneutics (De Gruyter Oldenbourg) in September 2022.